Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 43.djvu/375

Rh were not regarded with disfavor, the augur, the haruspex, and the keeper of the sibyl's books being considered as part of the regular state life of Greece and Rome.

With the advent of Christianity, however, there came a great change. In the matter which we are considering, as in many another, old things had passed away and all things had become new. Before very long after the death of Jesus the Christians were filled with a sense of the awful presence—in fact, the omnipresence—of Satan, which colored their every thought and act. This, added to the idea of eternal punishment—a fate reserved for all those about them who were not of the new faith—gave to the early Christians an intensely realistic sense of evil and an eager readiness to believe in agents of evil of a supernatural order. To their minds the world about them, with its imperial government and especially its non-Christian church ritual, was simply a great object-lesson of Satan's unbridled sway. Everywhere they saw the finger of Beelzebub, the prince of devils. These facts, or rather supposed facts, together with various philosophical systems, such as the system of Plato and that of the Gnostics, made the early Christians believe the earth, the sea, the very air, to be full of evil spirits, the emissaries and agents of Satan. Some of these were the spirits which had rebelled against God and had been hurled "sheer o'er the crystal battlements of heaven." Others were spirits which had gone hither and thither, deluding man in the antediluvian world. Others were heathen deities—Jupiter, Mars, Venus, and so on—all of whom, whether they were of good or of evil report among the Greeks or Romans, were equally evil spirits to the Christians. The spirits who, by these Greeks or Romans, were worshiped under the names of departed heroes—heroes who had achieved so many acts of splendid and philanthropic heroism—these were to the Christians not the real spirits of the dead, but merely devils who had answered the name and assumed the honors of the dead. No relation of life was free from this scourge of evil spirits; they even became the husbands or wives of the Christians themselves. Like the locusts of Pharaoh of old, they were over all the land. It is very hard for us now to imagine what all this means—it seems so laughable, these transformations and artifices and disguises to which the spirits resorted to do their master's bidding! But to these Christians of the second and succeeding centuries it was all stern reality—a matter of eternal life and death.

Now, what followed from all this? Simply that no truce was to be kept with, no mercy shown to, the sorcerer or magician; he it was who could send forth and summon back these spirits; he it was whom they must obey. He was worse, far worse, then, than the evil spirits, for the latter only followed the instincts of